Follow the chefs from Balthazar and Minetta Tavern (ok, former chefs–they're on their own now) on a wild, tipsy eating marathon through the new New Orleans

Riad Nasr looks at Lee Hanson, who is about to bite into a po'boy, his first ever, at Liuzza's by the Track, a typical neighborhood joint. It is the inaugural meal of what promises to be an epic four-day eating weekend in New Orleans. Hanson sinks his teeth into the airy bread stuffed with fried oysters and "dressed" with pickles, mayo, lettuce, and tomato, all blessed with a judicious squirt of Crystal hot sauce. "I think so," he says (or something that sounds like it) through a mouthful of sandwich. Nasr grins a knowing grin. "Here we go," he says.

New Orleans has a way of turning people–those who live in the city and those who just love it–into evangelists, possessed by an urge to spread the gospel. Their ultimate goal? The moment when a newbie gets New Orleans–its mix of tradition and abandon, its devotion to rituals high and low. Such was the situation with Hanson and Nasr. Back home, the friends and co-chefs behind New York's Minetta Tavern, Balthazar, and a handful of other restaurants are about to set off on their own and open a place that is theirs alone. Before that can happen, however, there is this pilgrimage. Nasr is a New Orleans devotee. He makes four or five trips there a year, in part because his wife, Dava, is the guitarist for the NOLA-based rock band Star & Dagger. Hanson has never been. Nasr's mission is to introduce his friend to New Orleans in the best way possible: through its food.

Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, between meals.

Not long ago, it would have been easy to say exactly what that meant–gumbo, fried seafood, sherry-spiked turtle soup, maybe the garlicky bite of a roast beef po'boy or a classic Napoleon House muffuletta. For a small city in a big country, New Orleans already had a disproportionate number of signature dishes worth traveling for.

And yet in recent years, the notion of what eating in New Orleans means has become immeasurably more complicated–in the best possible way. Since Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees in 2005, the city's dining ecosystem has not only roared back but has done so deeper and broader than ever. Vietnamese food, long a staple on the city's immigrant outskirts, is now available up and down Magazine Street. Every dive bar in the exploding neighborhoods of the Marigny and the Bywater, whose once-scruffy shotgun houses are being filled by hipsters, now seems to come with a pop-up attached or a food truck idling outside. Falafel, Filipino, barbecue, and "Slavic soul food" are all accepted parts of the city's food fabric. Once proudly insular, New Orleans has grown attuned to whatever food movements are afoot in cities like New York or San Francisco, from farm-to-table to the elevation of the cheeseburger.

All of this has become part of what it means to say "New Orleans food." It is, by any measure, too much for anybody to cover in a long weekend–even two guys with the heroic constitutions of working chefs. But that doesn't mean that Hanson and Nasr aren't going to try.

The best New Orleans eating tours veer from high to low and from new to old, from the comfortable to the unexpected–all lubricated by a significant amount of liquid sustenance. It is, for instance, entirely possible–indeed desirable–to follow a civilized Boulevardier cocktail at the wood-paneled Arnaud's French 75 Bar with a Shark Attack (part drink, part puppet theater) at the chartreuse-laser-lit Tropical Isle, just down Bourbon Street. The whiplash is part of the experience. Likewise, until a recent change in ownership, hungry visitors to the Hi-Ho Lounge, a music club on the emerging bar strip of St. Claude Avenue, could choose between the angel and the devil on their shoulders: either vegan Korean food from a window in the back or hot-link sausages sizzling on a trailer grill in the street out front, all enjoyed on ruby-red pleather banquettes that had been dragged onto the sidewalk. The correct answer was usually both.

This more-is-more, all-of-the-above philosophy, it quickly becomes clear, will be the presiding ethos of our chefs' tour. It starts with that oyster po'boy, served with a side of dark, smoky gumbo, at ­Liuzza's. Perhaps it would be smart to slow down, it is suggested, as the sandwich disappears beneath Hanson's mustache. "I'm not smart," he says, popping the last bite into his mouth.

Killer Poboy’s grilled shrimp po’boy, banh-mi-style.

Indeed not. After a quick stop at nearby Willie Mae's Scotch House for its legendary fried chicken (the genius move here is to let your friends order the chicken and go for a pork chop in the same walnut-hued batter), we plunge into the heart of the French Quarter. We duck into a dive called the Erin Rose, a spot popular with restaurant workers getting off their shifts, passing through the smoke-filled front bar to a back room. There, a tiny kitchen that once pumped out Tater Tots to hungry drunks now provides the same crowd with "internationally inspired, chef-crafted" sandwiches by Killer Poboys. Cam Boudreaux and April Bellow, two cooks with fine-dining pedigrees, opened it as a pop-up last year and started a po'boy revolution.

"I hang out in a bar and make sandwiches," Boudreaux says as he prepares a po'boy filled with luscious rum and ginger-marinated pork belly leavened by crisp lime slaw, and another of grilled shrimp, served banh mi-style with pickled radishes. "I don't have any investors to worry about, only a couple employees. And I make a great product."

Tucked next to a Golden Tee video game, Hanson and Nasr, who've spent the last 16 years being responsible for a small empire, could be forgiven for feeling slight pangs of envy at this statement. The two met more than 20 years ago, working the line at New York's Daniel, and bonded over a shared sensibility (and a love of hockey). When restaurateur Keith McNally asked Nasr to open Balthazar, a perfect re-­creation of a Paris brasserie in a former SoHo leather warehouse, Nasr accepted on the condition that Hanson be hired as his culinary partner.

Now the two interact with the ease of brothers, or, as they often joke, a long-married couple. In truth, this trip is a rare opportunity for them to spend time together; usually one was helming the kitchen at ­Minetta Tavern while the other looked after the kitchens that served the rest of McNally's booming restaurant group.

There's a common quip in New Orleans that visitors should drink the local take on the Bloody Mary–festooned with pickled okra, green beans, and more–because it may be the only vegetables they'll get while in town. A Bloody Mary or three is still an essential part of a New Orleans weekend, but the joke is dated. Thanks to demanding diners and improved suppliers, chefs are accessing better produce than ever. We see plenty of evidence of that: At the five-year-old Coquette, one of the city's new breed of modern American bistros, lusty Gulf shrimp and grits are complemented by a plate of raw and pickled vegetables arranged into a composition as colorful as a Chihuly glass sculpture; at Domenica, where chef Alon Shaya's whole head of cauliflower is roasted to a deep brown and served with a dish of whipped goat cheese, a steak knife stuck triumphantly in its crown, as though it had been hunted down in some enchanted cauliflower forest; even at Cochon where crisp pickled cucumbers flecked with herbs or a bright salad of wild mushrooms (admittedly tossed with homemade Slim Jims) are the key to conquering the battleship-heavy, nose-to-tail entrées.

Which is not to say that New Orleans has gone soft. There are still few things as primal as the spring ritual of lining up shoulder to shoulder like lions at a kill, to devour thousands of steaming crimson crawfish. It may be the closest modern man gets to sacking Carthage.

Something of that spirit exists (albeit in mandatory jackets for men) at Galatoire's, the most vital of the city's old-guard French-Creole restaurants and a kind of commissary for the city's elite. There are no reservations in the iconic downstairs space, and instead of requesting a usual table, regulars ask for their usual waiter, a bond as tight as family. After waiting two hours (or three Sazeracs, to use the preferred unit of Galatoire's time) for a table at Friday lunch, Hanson and Nasr devour plates of grilled pompano meuniere amandine and dishes of lump crabmeat blanketed by butter and artichokes. Choruses of "Happy Birthday" ring out in the huge, overlit room; strangers in blue blazers and silver hair sit down to chat; dessert is café brûlot–coffee mixed with brandy, orange, and spices, then drizzled, aflame, into cups (and often onto the tablecloth). It is well known that New Orleanians are allowed to drink on the street, a practice that some would argue represents one of the pinnacles of civilized living. It is less well known that they also drink as though they were on the street in some of the city's oldest high-end establishments.

Onward we push. At La Petite Grocery, another of the new NOLA bistros, we tuck into soufflé-like blue crab beignets. Then it's on to The Company Burger. It's not every burger joint that displays all six volumes of Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine on its counter. Luckily, the eponymous burger owes more to In-N-Out than to a lab. To Hanson and Nasr, whose Black Label burger at Minetta Tavern is the country's gold standard, the pedigree is clear: "It's not just a burger," says Nasr. "It's passionate and super-thought-out. It's a chef's burger."

On our last night, we come to rest at Bacchanal, in the far reaches of the Bywater. After Katrina, this wine store opened its backyard for mobile dinners served by chefs displaced from their own kitchens. Now it has a permanent kitchen and menu of its own, and, on a clear, warm night, one of the most beautiful scenes in all of New Orleans.

A backyard crawfish boil at a house party uptown, a NOLA spring ritual.

A trio plays jazz on the small stage. The mismatched tables fill with groups carrying bottles of wine from the store. Tiki torches flicker as the sun sets. And from the kitchen come leafy salads of smoked trout, apple, and Manchego cheese; chicken confit on white beans; steak frites with kimchi butter. None of it is remotely what you might call traditional New Orleans food, and yet there is no other place we could possibly be."So, what do you think?" asks Nasr.

Hanson is sitting back in his lawn chair, a glass of wine in his hand, a goofy grin on his face. The Moment. "I love it," he says. "I can't wait to get back here."

The music picks up. Another bottle arrives. "I knew you would," says Nasr.

Brett Martin moved to New Orleans from New York in 2011 and can't understand why everyone else didn't follow. His latest book,Difficult Men(Penguin Press), is out in July